


Waltzing Downwards

by Auchen



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Childhood Memories, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-03
Updated: 2014-11-03
Packaged: 2018-02-23 22:22:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2557826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Auchen/pseuds/Auchen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Oswald was never very good at dancing, but it was always something that he enjoyed until he was hobbled.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Waltzing Downwards

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by the fact that Robin Lord Taylor was apparently once in an interpretive dance group. It's also proof that I can turn even something silly into something angsty.

Oswald was never very good at dancing, but it was something he always enjoyed in his private moments. As a child when he was alone, he would sometimes hop a long to some little tune in his head that only he could hear, dodging the cracks in the sidewalk and avoiding the crumbling edges of the streets, making his movements into a sort of rhythm dictated by the slow decay of the city. 

Once one of his peers caught him doing it and said he looked like a ridiculous flapping bird when he was trying to dance. The boy got a swollen lip as a reward for his words, but Oswald made sure that his classmates didn’t see him dancing again. There was no reason to give them more fuel for their mocking.

Sometimes Oswald would put his mother’s Eastern European tapes on the old, crackling radio that sat in the corner of his room and would try to follow the beat of the foreign, rough words that were still somehow familiar to him. Even though he couldn’t translate what they said—his mother was insistent that he would be American, that he would not learn a language that would make him seen as anything but respectable—the sounds moved him in a way he couldn’t explain.

But he always made sure to keep the music turned down lest his mother pound on the door and ask him why he wasn’t doing homework or practicing piano on the small, poor excuse for an instrument that lay in their living room.

It became something private that no one else could take from him. Not his mother, not those that tore him apart with their words at every turn.

Until that day that his knee was shattered by something as simple as a chair leg. It wasn’t even something that should have mattered at all. There were much more important things on Oswald’s mind—like coming back from the dead for one—but it was still something that niggled at him in the darkness. Like when he sat alone in his stolen car, a singer on the radio quietly whining through a storm of static. He tried to tap his foot along to the Top 40 selection, but even that little motion sent waves up pain up his damaged limb.

It was just one more reason to give Fish Mooney the punishment she deserved.


End file.
